THE TAOS TATLER.

Waaaa! Twump shthowe our shwogan!

The excellent blogger at For What It’s Worth reports wailing and gnashing of the teeth at National Public Radio over the loss of the classic feminist marching cry, “My body, My Choice.” Apparently it was appropriated (a leftie euphemism for “stealing,” but only when they’re doing it) by protestors opposed to mandatory vaccination, most of whom happen to be Trump supporters.

The delicious irony of this is when the COVID vaccines were first introduced in 2020, when Trump was still president, the left was generally opposed to taking them–because Trump, of course. Later, when Sleepy Joe assumed office, the left changed its mind about vaccines when realizing they could be politicized by making them mandatory. As the saying goes, attributed to many, “liberals don’t care what you do as long as it’s compulsory.”

Meanwhile, “My Body, My Choice,” lying fallow at the time, was taken up by opponents of mandatory vaccination, an action apparently only discovered, and to their dismay, by militant feminists during the current brouhaha over the Supreme Court’s cashiering of Roe v. Wade.

So now, if you please, it’s “Reproductive Justice,” which does the job we suppose, but doesn’t quite trip off the tongue like “My Body My Choice,” does it? Too bad, infanticidists, you should have copyrighted it.

He promises a comeback, a promise we may be sure will be kept.

Despite a crushing defeat recently over Roe v. Wade, Satan accepts the loss gracefully and credits his team for a fantastic effort. He singles out for special praise team members Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood and Moloch.

With thanks to GWR.

At least she has an Ivy League diploma (sort of–from Brown), which she is happy to tell you about when asked or not asked.

The woman smiling at you above is Ms Tiara Mack and she is running for Rhode Island State Senate, District 10. As a representative in the Rhode Island House, she has sponsored a sex education bill which

 “shall be appropriate for students of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and shall affirmatively recognize pleasure based sexual relations, different sexual orientations and be inclusive of same-sex relationships in discussions and examples. In addition, comprehensive course instruction shall include gender, gender expression, gender identity, and the harm of negative gender stereotypes.”

So far the bill has gone nowhere, but give it time; Rhode Island is as looney left as neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut. Pay attention therefore to Ms Mack (in verbal media, if you prefer) for she is going places, certainly at least to Rhode Island’s Senate, as she is running unopposed.

The Not-So-Great Litany: Lord have mercy, indeed (e.g., using a foot wedge in golf?).

Here is our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition after slipping into something more comfortable.

Just when one thinks the Biden Administration has hit rock bottom (if you’ll pardon the expression) with its hires, they let gravity do its thing and sink even lower.

Ever protecting us from misinformation.

For once, Democrats and Republicans stand together.

Music for America by an American.

On this Independence Day it is a good thing to celebrate with music as well as fireworks. Since compositions by American greats  like Sousa and Gershwin are well represented (perhaps overly so) on this day, your Tatler will instead post a couple of links to compositions by another American great, Charles Ives.

Ives’s compositions were all but ignored most his career. His “daytime job” was  insurance, in which he was a pioneer. Among other innovations he was the inventor of what we now call “estate planning.” Ives made scads of money in this line, but it wasn’t until the end of his life he began to receive recognition for his music, most significantly from Leonard Bernstein, who programed one of his symphonies for a New York Philharmonic concert.

Link one is to the third movement of Ives’s Holliday Symphony: The Fourth of July. This is truly difficult music, to listen to and to play (note that two conductors are used in this performance). Nevertheless, the work is also tremendous good fun, chock full of quotes of American tunes, mostly patriotic ones. For example, listen for the tuba early into the piece playing Columbia the Gem of the Ocean (a favorite of Ives), softly and slow. Listeners will may glean from this piece understanding why turn-of-the-last-century audiences had a bit of difficulty with Ives’s music.

Link two isn’t difficult at all in the listening, just fun. It is however, like the last piece, difficult to play:Variations on ‘America‘ (My Country ’tis of Thee) for organ, composed when Ives was but 17 years old and already a virtuoso on that instrument. Watch the organist’s feet (appropriately adorned) flying about the pedalboard toward the end.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

All is not lost.

The past few years have been brutal to the United States. The radical left’s long march through the institutions is now effectively complete. Starting with the government, leftists have moved through corporations, education, medicine, science, arts and God knows what else, with most of their targets cravenly capitulating to wokeness. At the left’s behest those institutions now busy themselves undoing things that once made this country a beacon to the rest of the world. These days it is understandable to gloomily perceive the United States as a giant deteriorating socialist mediocrity, no longer respected–indeed ridiculed–while a resigned populace stands by helpless.

Or so it would seem. This writer is grateful to the estimable and veteran blogger Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, for posting this Independence Day a link to a superb piece in Sean Dietrich’s blog Sean of the South, which is simply entitled Mendon, Missouri. That tiny locale is where last week an Amtrak train running at 87 mph slammed into a massive dump truck inexplicably parked at a crossing, with catastrophic results. Dietrich describes nicely two reactions that took place following the accident, the first one seeming all-too-typical to most Americans.

Reporters from national newspapers visited. They photographed, videoed and wrote. Cable news anchors wore frowny faces and mentioned the wreck, just before cutting to commercials urging elderly viewers to reverse mortgage their livers.

The second reaction was mostly ignored by our media, which typically declines reporting on Americans acting contrary to received opinion.

Throngs of ordinary townspeople arrived before first responders even knew about the crash. There were volunteers crawling out of the wallpaper.

“It was a wonderful problem to have,” said school district superintendent, Eric Hoyt, “but we probably had too many volunteers show up.”

People came from all over Chariton County, riding beat-up Silverados, ATVs or arriving on foot. They came from Sumner, Marceline, Cunningham, Brookfield and Indian Grove.

Two Boy Scout troops dutifully helped injured victims from the wreckage. Local high-schoolers were fashioning bandages out of bandannas. Old women recited the Lord’s Prayer alongside strangers in blood-stained clothes.

There were farmers, off-duty nurses, truck drivers, soccer moms, Little League coaches and grade-schoolers. They were doling out food, first aid, bottled water and, most importantly, phone chargers.

Victims were taken to local homes, fed, bathed and bandaged. Weeping passengers were embraced by rural preachers. Passengers using wheelchairs were lifted from the rubble by young men in ropers and camouflage caps.

Local schoolbus drivers transported the wounded to hospitals. Northwestern High School staff members triaged victims in the gymnasium and fed people in the cafeteria.

One resident said that Mendon didn’t feel like a 171-person town anymore. “It was like 671 people came together.”

And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.

That, dear readers, is one of the “glimmers of hope” your Tatler wrote of in an earlier post concerning our dark times, ordinary Americans. Not only do they thrive, by definition they vastly outnumber the so-called elites who paradoxically insist their cynicism and anger is the prevailing mood of the land.

It isn’t. It is however up to ordinary Americans to rise up, collectively cry “enough!” and consign the scheming and hateful anti-American elites to oblivion, which being so outnumbered ought not prove too arduous. The next step is taking back our country so “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”